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Articles We Never Finished Reading: And I'd Rather Be On A Yacht In Greece

Cory Finley, a recent Yale graduate, applied to work at Bridgewater Associates, a large Connecticut-based hedge fund, during his senior year of college. Mr. Finley, 23, said there was “definitely something tempting” about the structure and prestige of a high-paying finance job. But he decided to follow his dream of becoming a playwright instead.

            - Kevin Roose, "Wall Street's Latest Campus Recruiting Crisis" in the New York Times.

Now, look, I'm sure that the financial crisis and the pressure on banks and investment firms to limit bonuses has changed the career plans of some college seniors... but come on. The kid who says "I thought about investment banking, but then decided to be a playwright" is hardly a serious example of what, I suspect, is a dubious trend article anyway. Aside from Finley, Roose has found about one other college grad to speak to their recruiting experience, and padded the article with obvious quotes about how this week's disgruntled resignation letter in the Op-Ed section proves no one wants to work at Goldman Sachs. Is that a trend? Probably not. But back to our poet. Nothing says "I don't need to work" like a 23 year old who can take all the time he needs to craft a play. I know I wanted to take some time off after graduating college and write a novel. Unfortunately, I also needed to do things like eat, and have a roof over my head. Still do. But if anyone wants to fund my foray into novel writing, let me know. I'm totally worth it.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: Not That Different From Each Other

Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, buttonholing the reader in his short story “The Rich Boy” (1926). “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” Today’s rich are not only different from you and me but different from yesterday’s.

No one who has followed the heedless speculation that led to the 2008 financial meltdown and the subsequent bailouts would think of millennial-era greedheads as being anything other than steel-toed in advancing and achieving their interests; it is the rest of us who appear soft, our trust playing us for suckers. The distance between Fitzgerald’s very rich—now the extremely rich, the 1 percent—and the remaining 99 percent has never been steeper. The 1 percent occupy a higher altitude than the rest of us: their clouds look fluffier; their sunlight gleams with Hollywood gold. In Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis novels and in film classics from the previous century, the rich are portrayed as builders and expansionists, their pharaoh fortunes amassed from steel, brick, minerals, timber, railroads, shipbuilding, newspaper publishing; even those who won their money on Wall Street seem propped on industrial girders. Round-bellied, a watch fob looped from a vest pocket, these bankers and tycoons command offices as grand as railway stations, eat in dining rooms fit for Versailles. What they do and how they live have weight, imprint. The vast wealth depicted in movie/TV drama today is divorced from manufacturing and an invisible army of laborers doing their part; it’s divorced from anything resembling work. It’s floating and caressing, immortalizing.

- the generally perceptive James Wolcott, blathering about images of wealth on TV in the latest issue of Vanity Fair.

Now I generally like Wolcott, and I especially like him when it comes to culture watching - he takes it seriously, and he watches a lot - but this one is weak. Never mind the kind of lazy premise, a chance to quickly rope in a wide swath of series television in a highly generalized observation; the problem actually lies in the premise itself - his notion that somehow wealth today is vastly different from wealth in the past. This is just absurd - the first decade of the Twentieth Century was called The Gilded Age for a reason, and it wasn't because the men who made fortunes were "builders and expansionists"; it's because they made enormous profits in their businesses, and even more money in stocks and financial dealings. The Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, Morgans and Whitneys and Astors were not especially different from the wealthy bankers and hedge fund types of today: flush with absurd amounts of cash, spending it on pointless displays of generally poor taste. Wolcott generalizes off of Theordore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis... as if he's never heard of Edith Wharton or Henry James, the real chroniclers of this life of ease and indolence. Indeed, he goes so far as to dress up this middling case with a familiar line from the greatest of these observers of wealth, Fitzgerald himself, as if to miss entirely the point of The Great Gatsby.

I'm not trying to suggest that film and television are doing some great job dramatizing the realities of life as most of us face them; but what's deeply problematic in Wolcott's narrow view is some sense that This Just Happened and It's Not Like How They Used To Do It. The reality is... this is exactly how they used to do it, and it works. And perhaps the most telling failure to see this lies in Wolcott completely overlooking the largest and most tasteless display of excessive wealth: Downton Abbey. Or doesn't that count?

...But Why Give To Susan G Komen In The First Place?

All those 5K runs and long walks and pink ribbons and all the rest... if this week is the moment that some women realize there's a problem in breast cancer fundraising, all I can say is, you're really late. The industry of fundraising around breast cancer "awareness", treatment, research and "finding a cure" has long been excessive and in need of a good bit of questioning. And if it takes a stunningly strange decision by  executives at the Susan G Komen foundation to do it, well, there's another thing one ought to ask more clearly: why is everyone giving money to the Susan G Komen fund anyway?

The Susan G Komen Race For The Cure was, at its inception, a clever idea: Komen was an active woman who apparently enjoyed those 5K races (before she was diagnosed and died of breast cancer), it tapped into a group of active young women who are probably the third (or fourth wave) of feminism looking for ways to be active (especially a group of young, mid-level corporate women), and it served as a good reminder that women have the economic leverage, now, to make a difference on causes they care about most.

Trouble is, "Susan G Komen" also became a kind of corporate shorthand for easy giving to a cause. You can buy lipstick and detergent and cereal and God knows what else these days, and "a portion of the proceeds" will go to Komen. Bank of America will give you a Susan Komen Visa, for God's sake. For fashion and advertising and health and beauty - or more to the point, anything in the industry of selling things to women - the easy way to look good and caring is to wrap something in pink and slap the Susan G Komen name on it.

Pink. Seriously, all this stuff, and they've colored it pink and say its for breast cancer awareness and the fact that it's also gendered and sexist determinism, suddenly flies out the window because it's for "Breast Cancer" and that makes it practically illegal to point out that most of this stuff is exploitative and kind of offensive... because say that, and somehow you're an uncaring lout who doesn't care about the millions of women with breast cancer.

And what does the Susan G Komen Foundation do, anyway? Well... mostly, they raise money, or spend money to raise yet more money, planning events and running races and all the rest. Do they actually do breast cancer research? Do they do breast cancer screenings? Do they treat patients? No, none of these, and not much else. What they do is take the money they raise - and I'm sure it's a reasonable percentage as these things go, not some scandal about them keeping more of it than they give away... but that's not my point. My point is, they take the money they raise... and they give it to the people who actually do those things.

At some point, one can reasonably say... why are you giving money to a third party when you could just as easily give the money you want to see used for breast cancer screenings and treatment and research and all the rest... and give it to the people who actually do that?

The thing that this "scandal" about Komen dropping Planned Parenthood reveals is not (just) that it exposes some woman at Komen as a pro-life tool, or that it puts both organizatiosn squarely in the middle of white hot women's politics (abortion is so the issue that's all over this election season that most men like to pretend isn't)... the thing about this scandal that cuts to th heart of charitable giving is that it makes something really lazy and embarrassing really obvious about all these people giving to Komen as if they're doing something. In other words... if you want to give money to see more women screened for breast cancer... give it to Planned Parenthood. Like you should have been doing, anyway.

I'm not trying to make people feel guilty or bad about giving to Komen; but from the start, sending money to "The Susan G Komen Fund For The Cure" has been, as charity often is, a class issue masquerading as kindness. It's third party, hands clean, do a little something, but just a little, for a difficult issue. Do you have some money, a little time, do you like parties or running or really long walkathons? Do you like to wear pink? Then we have the charity for you! Because that's what "charity" is, that's how charity works... it's comfortable, well off people who can watch other people's difficulties from a comfortable distance giving money to make sure other people take care of whatever it is that's wrong.

There's nothing wrong, really with giving money that goes to the Komen fund; even if they don't give it to Planned Parenthood, I'm sure they give it to a lot of worthy enterprises that are doing things to treat and research breast cancer. There's also nothing wrong with giving money, or having the kind of wealth that allows you to give generously. But the problem is, and has been, that giving money in this kind of corporate, three hands from the source kind of way is just what the past couple of days reminds us - you are at the mercy of a lot of well meaning people whose actions you don't control and have very little say over. And the reason people give to Komen, rather than to the actual sources, is because it would be harder, and take more work, to figure out what that is, how to give that way, and also still not think about the fact that you could do a lot more, really, than just give money. Or race for the cure. And people with the money to give don't like to spend a lot of time, often, thinking about all of that.

 

Like Death And Taxes... And The South Will Rise Again

All right, yes, I couldn't have anticipated quite so much going quite so wrong for Mitt Romney in one week - and my point about the Iowa GOP and the New Hampshire GOP actually having problems with each other still stands, more emphatically - but the attempts to manufacture lots of "Mitt might fail" drama after South Carolina's primary seems like a stretch. I don't know if Mitt Romney can win this fall or not (though I'm more convinced not), but two things I do know are that our next President will not be Newt Gingrich. Or Rick Santorum.

The past week is a reminder that Mitt Romney is well set up for losing if only for this: five years, millions of dollars, lots of preparation... and this is as good as he got. And what he's got is, well, nothing. His campaign team apparently couldn't imagine winning New Hampshire and losing South Carolina. He wasn't prepared to talk about Bain in detail, his personal income, or his taxes. And still, he offers little more in the way of a campaign than "I'm not a loser like Barack Obama, and I've run a business. QED, bitches."

If there's a reason this year's election looks so dismal - and most emphatically is not, as Mitt likes to suggest, the election of our lifetimes - it's because both of the major parties most likely candidates seem unable to rise above inept campaign strategies. Mitt's a lousy candidate surrounded by apparent mediocrity; while the President insists on shouldering this unpleasant task for our own good, surrounded by advisors whose best case appears to be "well... who else is there?" One can't really blame for priary voters in the Republican Party for voting as if screaming for a lifeboat. Anything, anything... but not this.

There's lots of pundit theorizing, but the question of why Newt Gingrich won South Carolina is just not that deep: South Carolina reasserted itself, this week, as the acid test of who is sufficiently seen as Southern and right wing enough to satsfy the most extreme elements of the right wing base. This generally means a Southerner; not - as many northerners like to oversimplify it - because the south is racist. It's more than that. The notions of disdain for other types of existence is about a lot more than race; it's also anti-intellectual, anti-urban, anti-cosmopolitan of any sort. Mitt Romney, probably, never stood a chance in South Carolina, simply because he's an educated northeasterner from a wealthy, patrician family in the most traditional sense. And really, a similar rejection of northern working class success explains why Rick Santorum, as well, probably also never stood a chance to consolidate his bona fides as the conservative alternative. Newt, in the end, was the guy from the state next door (remember how that same logic is supposed to invalidate Mitt's win in NH?), who spoke Southern and right wing talk radio as no one else could... or would want to.  South Carolina's right wing base roared up and delivered a message that scares the national party to death: ignore the South at your peril. 

At the same time, the impotence of relying, yet again, on a Southern strategy as embodied by Gingrich is all too clear: Gingrich is a lousy candidate, whose own moral failings don't remotely jibe with Evangelical voters. There's lots of discussion, naturally, about how Gingrich's marital failings werre conveniently overlooked on his way to victory, but I'll double down on my thinking that America is in no mood to reward divorce, especially as practiced by someone like Newt Gingrich.  The mess of Gingrich's personal life was saved, really, by the bitter, opportunistic way Marianne Gingrich obviously inserted herself into the political process, and by John King's oblivious, ham-handed attempt to shoehorn a nonexistent "issue" of it into the next debate. "Don't vote for my philandering ex-husband" makes people uncomfortable, even if they agree with the description. And Gingrich, dressing down King, was substantively right - King didn't even try to concoct a question that made any sense, and was trying, mostly, to embarrass Gingrich. And Gingrich, obviously, is beyond shame. 

Romney, on the other hand, isn't: what was fascinating about his tax and salary debacle was how much he betrayed the realities of class, and of his life in the upper class in particular. It's tacky, when you're rich, to talk about just how much money you have. Romney, clearly, isn't comfortable either explaining, or God forbid, justifying his own lavish wealth. He's oblivious to how his own money compares to others - calling his $350,000 plus in one year's speaking fees "small" is probably, comparatively, correct for him. It's just tuneless (and tasteless) when relating to the public as a whole. His tax rate, too, is probably not the biggest deal; it's interesting to note that Romney more or less made the same admission Warren Buffett did about his effective tax rate. Buffett, of course, gets a pass; he favors tax increases. As the more sardonic among us note, me included, nothing precludes Buffett from sending the government more money than he owes. Which is to say... in the end, is Buffett really so superior to Romney, on taxes? So why is Romney's relatively honest admission such a bad thing?

Like John Kerry before him - and more than a few others as well, before them - Romney can't win unless he learns to step out of his own patrician class understandings and expectations. South Carolina was, in no small measure, a reminder of just how and why the Republican base has moved to reject the "Country Club" core of its past; the democratization of wealth and education has up-ended traditional notions of class in our country... but class divisions don't just go away. They are cultural and societal, constructs, not just economic and political ones. Romney's tone-deaf invocation of Class Envy (both in New Hampshire and even after South Carolina) will ruin him in a general election; what's striking is how Republican voters - the ones who piously claim that "class warfare" is a liberal construct - are also, clearly, turned off by that logic. Romney's experience at Bain Capital, it turns out, isn't just an easy target for liberals looking to paint him as Mr. One Percent; appaently even many ordinary Republicans get that a pampered millionaire scion makes a terrible spokeperson for the virtues of American wealth.

The Republican Establishment, really, can't mask the internal dissensions and divisions that are tearing their party apart; what's apparent after three contests, and Florida will likely make more plain, is that there is no one person who can unify and give voice to the conservative right. The wisest Republicans, still, seem to be the ones who decided to flee this year's contest - Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, John Thune... and on and on. They know, as most of us do, that Republicans can't really beat Barack Obama because they don't really have a coherent alternative policy to sell. But South Carolina is a reminder that attempting to find a coherent policy is both impossible in the current climate and can't happen without alientaing some group or another. Newt Gingrich will, most likely, be the voice of the angry Southern conservative at this year's convention, which might be enough to make him the nominee, but I doubt it. Either way, until the Republicans can figure out how to effectively get beyond their Southern base, they've got nothing. And wouldn't nothing be better represented by Mitt Romney, anyway?

The Payroll Tax Break Is Kind Of Dumb. And So Is Not Extending It.

So a while back, the Democrats wanted to pass a tax break for "working families" (I'm sorry, I am a lifelong Democrat and I will stand up and cheer when someone, someday, kills off the phrase "working families". It just makes my teeth grate), and they came up with this kind of silly idea: they would lower the payroll tax.

It's a dumb idea because, first, the payroll tax is the funding mechanism for Social Security. This is the same Social Security that politicians like to claim is in "danger" when it isn't- though funding Social Security payouts long term has some fiscal problems... in any case, the way to keep Social Security solvent does not involve underfunding it.

That's okay, one can reply, because the Payroll Tax Cut had a funding mechanism in which the lost revenues are replaced by "general funds". This is usually called Robbing Peter To Pay Paul, or in this case, using tax receipts collected for one purpose to pay for other tax receipts that should have been collected but weren't, while borrowing money to make up for the shortfall.

This is really dumb. This is why department stores won't let you buy gift certificates, and then use the gift certificates to pay off your department store credit card bill.

Anyway, it's also a dumb idea to cut the payroll tax by a small amount because the small windfall most taxpayers receive is a) largely unnoticed, and b) probably not used to do things like pay down debt or improve savings. Because our economy is consumer driven, what they want people to do is shop. Which means buying things you don't need and probably can't afford. As opposed to taking some of your paycheck, and paying it into a savings plan that will pay out when you retire.

Oh, never mind.

The problem is that the payroll tax rteduction was put in place for a year, and it's now set to expire, and when it does, everyone will notice that their taxes went up. And Democrats - or more specifically, the President's reelection team - is worried that less money in people's paychecks will make them grumpy and grumpy people vote for Newt Gingrich. Or Rick Santorum. Or something.

Naturally, Republicans are in no mood to extend a tax break that makes the President look good (cue the natural segue into how Republicans Hate Working Families), and also are kind of mad about several other things, notably this plan to build a pipeline across the country north to south so that Canadian oil shale can be efficiently delivered to refineries in Texas. Oil shale is also a pretty dumb idea (slightly less dumb than fracking, but still), and the pipeline could probably be rerouted, but mostly, this "debate" is a lot of the smae thing we get these days of terrible, useless Washington politics. One dumb idea in exchange for another. None of which really addresses the problems we actually face.

I don't really care about any of this - which is why I don't write daily about the dramatic brinksmanship going on in DC - and frankly, I'd be fine if the payroll tax went back to normal and someone actually took brinksmanship over, and past, the brink. Perhaps then, something might change, a bit. I know, it's a foool's notion. But I remain optimistically foolish. Just for spite.

In any case, the payroll tax break is a dumb idea, but extending it is probably better than not extending it... but frankly, it's the fact that we're all standing around talking about this stupidity that just floors me. And also why I'd probably rather eat Christmas cookies, watch reruns of SVU, and hope the whole thing just goes away. Who's with me?

The Failure Formerly Known As Our Last President

Of course the "Super Committee" - what a dopey name - "failed." It was designed to fail, set up to fail, populated with people for whom failure was the only option. When President Obama announced the deal to extend the debt ceiling, with its absurd conditions, including a committee which would generate $1.2 trillion in cuts... or else... the painful stench of failure was already there. 

And really, it just never went away.

It's easy to pin this failure as Example 376 of How Washington Is Not Working. I find the sight of the pundits, all weekend and through yesterday, earnestly insisting that the Comittee wasn't a foregone exercise in failure, but an earnest attempt to get it done, both sad and hilarious. Nobody thought there was a workable deal. And the people who thought This Time Would Be Different are especially foolish and gullible.

Of course, Washington isn't working...but simply blaming the current crop of politicians is too easy. This is failure that Americans actually voted for, and we, as voters and citizens ought to own up to our role in it. These people in DC fail because, in no small part, we want them to fail. We don't want to pay more taxes, we don't want to see government services cut, many people just want what we had before the economy fell apart.... or more precisely, the economy we had mostly under Bill Clinton.

We elect people who promise not to make the hard choices... and then wonder why they don't make them. 

So beyond the obvious failure, the one we knew was going to happen months ago, what else was at work here, and what happens now? Well, I'd argue that the real success here, the one that was set up months ago, is a long term success for Democrats, and it's success that builds on the real failure that we've been struggling with for close to ten years... the failed Presidency of George W. Bush.

Why are we in this "debt crisis"? Well, we're here for a couple of reasons. One is because of a set of tax cuts, passed during the Bush years, which have decimated the amount of revenue the government takes in by artificially cutting everyone's income tax rate. The other reason is the implosion of financial markets, driven by an explosion in mortgage bonds fueld by bad loans... and exacerbated, in no small part, by a President who insisted "everyone should own a home," and who pushed policies and programs that would do that, including pushing people into loans that many shouldn't have taken and couldn't afford.

Since 2006, Republicans have lost election after election because of the failures of George W' Bush. That includes his policy failures, and the campaign of deep divisiveness pursued by his advisors. It also includes a failure on the part of current Republicans to repudiate the Bush-era disasters, and to develop new strategies. It's why Republicans have "problems with their base" and "Tea Party" politics driven by anger and loyalty tests to failed, contradictory philosophies.

Democrats, too, struggle with the Bush-era failures; though we made steady progress back to elected majorities in Congress and elected a President, the hangover of failed Bush policies has made dealing with the aftermath difficult. President Obama has proven to be weakest on economic issues, putting a team in place whose connections to banking and finance and acceptance of the status quo added to our problems. With no significant reform of foreclosures, big banking, or the mortgage industry, we have few real options for solving our current economic crisis. And on tax cuts, President Obama and congressional Democrats have been afraid to speak plainly that the Bush tax cuts - all of them - simply must go.

The "Super Failure" though, may offer some glimmers of solutions down the road - if the automatic cuts are adhered to, then some progress on spending will happen... and it will happen to the Defense Department, where it is long overdue. But more importantly, it now seems likely that the Bush tax cuts may well expire fully at the end of 2012. It seems clear that Congressional Democrats will not be blackmailed into bad deals over making the Bush cuts permanent, and the will to extend them past 2012 weakens every day. Further, the Super Committee debates, which rehashed familiar arguments on all sides, led more than a few pundits to a natural conclusion - we can talk about the Bush tax cuts ending, because more people are realizing that a main reaosn our deficits are so enormous is because tax policy makes no sense.

Republicans are, clearly, pinning a lot of their hopes to the elections next year, that dissatisfaction with President Obama - and managing to shift blame for much of the Bush hangover on to him - will give them the Presidency and greater control of Congress. There may be a scenario where Mitt Romney can become President... but it's still pretty unlikely, and no one, really can say what Romney's approach to economic policy would be with certainty (that's the underlying concern about his all over the place previous positions). But it doesn't matter when we're talking Bush tax cuts; those expire after the general election before the next President takes orfice. If Obama loses the eection... who thinks he'll sign off on a further extension of the Bush cuts? His best mischief would be to let them expire... and forc Romney to try and argue that recreating them makes sound budgetary sense. That won't happen, either.

Allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire will force us to move forward on other discussions - how to really tackle health care costs, reexamining the problems with banks and foreclosures, and probably having some sensible discussions about separating what's essential in governmetn spending from what can, and should, get cut. We could reform payroll taxes by raising the income ceiling. We could do tax reform that reduces deductions and resets tax rates in a smarter way than the Bush approach. There's a lot of options, and if the Bush cuts expire, we could start to figure out what they are.

Republicans need to lose next year because the Bush Presidency needs, still, to be fully and complretely repudiated. Our media avoids mentioning the failed Bush Presidency, partly because it's divisive, and partly because we don't like to talk about our past, especially our recent past. And the silence over the failed Bush presidency has alowed Republicans to pretend both that it never happened and that if it did happen, let's remember the parts we like. The failure of the Super Committee - whether we're talking the failures of deep political divisions that squashed meaningful debate, or the practical failures of deep debt and a wrecked economy, all stem directly, and pointedly, from the failures we lived through under George W. Bush. Thank goodness, really, that the Super Committee failed rather than giving us yet another way to paper over the Bush Administration's failures without directly naming them. The stench of failure you smell... that's the lingering smell of that failed President we had last time. Let's not go there again.

The Occupation Ends... And The World Goes Round

If it's worth having a "two month anniversary", can I at least get a few moments to ask what Occupy Wall Street managed to accomplish in two months?

And if I say, at best, the OWS movement has been a literal mess... do I still really have to apologize for not being a good lefty?

Either way, I'm still here, and I'm still saying it: two months of this poorly thought through, lousily executed protest and all we've got to show for it are our chains - I mean, those metaphorical ones where we 99% are shackled to the wheel, grinding away for the 1%. Or something.

Little over a month ago I said what, I figured at the time, was not wildly out of line: it seemed hard to tell what OWS was trying to accomplish, it was hard to see how a lot of people camped out in a park would amount to much, and the likelihood of things breaking down into disarray and chaos and possibly violence seemed all too real. Can I at least get a point for having some small amount of prescience?

For about a couple of weeks, I had a post in mind about the fact that New Yorkers are, in fact, an extremely patient people - we get a bad rap for being angry and impatient, but it takes patience, and a remarkable sense of grace to live in the highly concentrated, congested quarters of America's largest city. And when it comes to acting out - and acting up - New Yorkers often turn out to be awfully patient. We just avoid Times Square, or go to the beach on Pride Parade week, or shop downtown while the New York City Marathon is running. Inconveniences happen. And most days, you will still have to wait in line for your morning coffee. Patience isn't just a virtue, it's essential.

That's why I don't think it's surprising that a lot of other cities and a number of other Mayors lost patience with their "Occupy" protests long before Bloomberg moved into Zucotti Park. Denver and Oakland and Portland and Seattle may give off West Coast (or Mountaintop) vibes of easy acceptance and anything goes... but all that mellowness is hard won and, well, leaves a dark cranky undercurrent. Live Free and Peaceful... just don't get out of line or cause too much trouble. Or we'll show up with tear gas and pepper spray.

By the time Bloomberg and Co moved in to Zucotti, patience wasn't jut thin, it was pretty much gone. "What do you want" has gone from being a plaintive cry to a sneer to a near screaming response. We get it... you're angry... but WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT? The reality, the sad reality, really, is that OWS has never quite figured that out. They're kind of mad about banks and world finance, they're kind of upset about foreclosures, there's a lot of "We Are The 99%"... but none of that amounts to a coherent case for changing something, never mind a set of proposals, always asked for, about some practical things that could be started right away, to really change things, or make a difference.

Even today, as the "Anniversary" is marked by fresh protests, Occupy Wall Street literally couldn't live up to its name. Still. Trying to march to Wall Street with the expressed purpose of "shutting down" the stock exchanges amounted to a lot of street blockades, some arrests... and little else. I spent the morning transfixed by the images on the business channels, where earnest, even caring, reporters tried to make sense of the protests... only to have to turn from that to reporting on the other actual business news of the days... because, regardless, the business of business was going to go on. Most obviously, and most tellingly, the idea of stopping or shutting the exchanges was impossible because "Wall Street" is no longer the center of the stock or bond market - the same internet that makes Twitter and Facebook the tools of the New Fangled Revolutions is the tool that's been destroying our economy at the speed of light. Nobody can shut down the stock markets without finding the "off" switch.

Much has been made of the "hundreds" of protests, the "thousands" of demonstrators, the "huge numbers" of bank accounts closed or moved in the movement's arguably one real challenge to the status quo, the Move Your Money protest. The reality though is that all of these big numbers are drops in a vast ocean of indifference and ignorance. Millions of people, still, probably don't know much about, or care, about Occupy protests. And even among the chattering classes, nominal support for some anger at economic injustice doesn't amount to doing anything at all. Millions of bank accounts are still at the largest (and worst run) banks. I don't love Chase, I think Jamie Dimon is part of the problem... but my checking account is still with them. And a Credit Union is no answer for me, though I still ponder the possibility.

And still, worst of all, I think, is the frustrating sense that blind support for Occupy is some kind of lefty expectation. Either you support the people in the streets... or you sympathize with the 1%. There's no way to say, apparently, still, that one cares deeply about economic justice and economic reforms, bank regulation and reduction of debt... but doesn't see the point of people camped out in parks, or swarming the streets turning a protest against banks into confrontations with police and local authority. Because, clearly, they're all the same. That kind of undifferentiated, nonspecific nature to the Occupy protests is the real and continuing indication that a leaderless mob is no answer to the problems we face. 

I'm sure some will argue that a) this isn't over (I'd agree), that b) this was a necessary step to future action and c) that these protests have had meaningful results, if one just looks hard enough. I don't think OWS is over, but future protests won't, really owe their future success or future support to Occupy; they will be successful when and if the case is made for taking action and expecting actual results. The failure of OWS to do either is real, and OWS owns it, and should, fairly, be termed as failed. As for "meaningful results"... replaying old debates about how police and local authorities handle mobs doesn't strike me as what OWS set out to do, and the results, mainly, are reminders that the public will accept a lot of mistreatment of protesters if the result is a return to normalcy where the protesters go away. And no, that's not me saying "yea mistreatment!", it's simply to say that, as for example in Oakland, our ability to find one side sympathetic gets harder when the mob goes off on a window breaking, stone throwing rampage.

And sure, the protesters remain in Zucotti Park, the leaderless meetings go on, more protests will no doubt occur.  It's going to be hard, though, to sustain that energy through a long winter. Even more pointedly, I'd wonder just who's doing what with all that money ($500,000, I read) and stuff that OWS "owns" though it's "not organized" and lacks a leadership. Today, I suspect, the two month anniversary may mark the movement's last real gasp of relevance. From here, it strikes me as dwindling participation, a lot of conflicts over money and property, and a sense of an opportunity in the distance that was missed. And maybe someone learned something from the failures of Occupy... but my own sense is to doubt that. Which means, come next summer, probably some new protests with similarly boisterous crowds, full of sound and fury, signifying very little at all.

Yet Another Of The Articles We Never Finished Reading

Or, "there isn't a violin small enough":

When Mr. [Tod] Abrams bought the brand-new apartment in 2007, his taxes were just $35 a month; he now pays $374 a month. When the exemption runs its course, in 2018, the monthly tax bill will be an estimated $1,629.

“It is utterly ridiculous,” said Mr. Abrams, a co-president of Alternative Marketing Solutions, which helps publicize films. “I have a home in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, and California is famous for high taxes, yet we don’t pay anything close to what I will be paying.”

- "421a Tax Exemption: Don’t Say You Didn’t Know" by Julie Satow, in the opening discussion of Tod Abrams' "mint condition" 2 bedroom condo, now on sale for $1.575 million (emphasis added).

And BTW, the last article we never finished reading, also in the NYT.

Michael Jackson And The Sleazy Doctor Blues

So apparently, even sleazy doctors should have standards.

I'm not quite sure what those standards should be, but at the very least, those charlatans and feelgoods and doctor mills should take note: almost anything goes with your painkiller addict patients. Just don't get too hands on when they OD.

I'm not trying to excuse Conrad Murray, God knows, justify his sleazy ethics (and lack of them), or suggest that his actions leading up to Michael Jackson's death are defensible... but watching yesterday's trial verdict - indeed, following the trial at all - was quite surreal. And so, on the one hand, there was somehow no other vedict possible but guilty. On the other, I'm still not entirely convinced that Murray, alone, bears sole guilt for Jackson's death.

What, after all, was Michael Jackson doing in the bedroom of a rented mansion in one of the wealthiest sections of Los Angeles? Well, partly, because he'd blown through a vast fortune feeding his expensive tastes, including an addiction to painkillers and barbituates. He'd been getting regular administaryion of Demerol... from his dermatologist. And finally, desperate for more cash, he'd signed on to do a massive series of live performances, a grueling schedule for the healthiest of performers (the only comparable schedule I could ever think of was both Bette Midler and Diana Ross, who each did a month or more at Radio City), which he wasn't.

Why was Conrad Murray on a six figure retainer to "treat" Michael Jackson? Because Jackson, and his people, convinced the tour promoters that Murray could serve as the required "physician" to certify that Jackson was healthy enought to perform, so that the concerts could be insured. And why was Murray administering regular doses of Propofol, a surgical anesthetic? Because Jackson's drug habits, and most likely his withdrawal from Demerol, left him sleep deprived and desperate.

Take away the millions and the fame and the media sideshow... and didn't we just more or less convict Jackson's drug dealer for shooting him up in a high-end smack shooting gallery? And if that's the case... then yes, I'm all for convicting drug dealers. But don't drug addicts bear some responsibility for their predicaments?

It's true,of course: Conrad Murray should never have signed on to the role of Michael Jackson's aesthesiologist. For one thing, it wasn't his specialty. For another, he seemed utterly naive about the depth of Jackson's addiction issues. But Jackson seems like an especially clever addict in this regard - finding the one doctor whose need for cash would override his muddled ethics long enough for him to get what he wanted.

But to lay guilt solely on Murray is to lose sight of how Jackson wound up in that place, at that time: the years of abuse as a child, the enabling behavior of record execs who "loaned" Jackson millions to feed his habits, and the cadre of sleazy doctors who fed Jackson's disastrous habits. Murray's not the first, or the last, or certainly the worst of a class of medical professionals whose prescription pad can be had at the right price. And Murray, it strikes me, is hardly the only reason Michael Jackson is dead.

Murray's conviction, in a cultural sense, absolves the rest of us of any feelings of guilt. Those of us who watched the Jackson freak show and knee something was not right, and that worshipful cult of Jackson's fans - some of the most obsessed and least clear sighted - for whom he could never do a wrong. That, after all, was Jackson's real drug: an approving crowd to applaud his every move, encourage his flights of fantasy, and never question his pain or criticize his choices. By all means, someone should try and stop those sleazy doctors. I just wish we'd stop kidding ourselves about what it takes to help drug addicts... or at least not pretend that Michael Jackson wasn't one.

CLASS-Less

With everyone focused so heavily on Occupations of one sort ot another (We're invading Africa! Again!), perhaps now is not the time to remind everyone about the other thing that the Obama Administration still struggles with - health reform.

Kathleen Sibelius made it official today, but this was in the wind for some time: the Administration has abandoned CLASS, the part of health care reform that was meant to provide some form of long term care insurance for seniors. Some of the ACA's most ardent defenders have had to do some backpedaling over this, because the long term care piece was both a signature achievement (it was one of Ted Kennedy's must-haves), and a fallback position when people complained that the ACA was mostly some moderate insurance reforms. "But we've also dealt with long term care!" was a big defense.

In reality CLASS was doomed because it made little or no sense. Indeed, as some especially disgusted partisans note, the real use of CLASS in the bill was to mask the fact that claims the bill was "revenue neutral" were never all that true. CLASS wasn't scheduled to kick in until 2016, but collections of fees and premiums were set to begin next year. By raising CLASS revenues well in advance of the program actually going live, the overall cost of ACA could book the revenue, without discussing the costs. And, the longer term reality was that, after CLASS kicked in, costs for the program were likely to soar.

That's because long term care - like rehabilitation for physical injuries, mental healthcare and other less time defined conditions - is actually very expensive to provide. One reason Medicaid is in such a disastrous state (among many) is because much of the program's funds are used to pay for nursing home care for the indigent elderly, complicated by the fact that nursing home costs will make most elderly people indigent long before they die. CLASS was always unrealistic - filled with rosy scenarios about how much the long term care would cost (even the $50 a day per person estimate on payouts was pretty ludicrous), and even under the rosiest scenarios, the program would cost far more than it could ever take in. Like... well, Medicaid.

Conservatives, of course, always opposed CLASS, much like the rest of the bill, because the math was so obvious and because it looked, more or less, like another entitlement that couldn't be appropriately funded from the get-go. This, of course, is indicative of the problem with health reform on the right: not that they don't make reasonable points about the cost of reform... but they've got essentially no solution but "suffer" when it comes to the actual problem. Opposing CLASS because of the expense missed the obvious - a program as badly conceived as CLASS was never going to happen.

All of which is to say that the Administration today was forced, yet again to admit the obvious: that, in fact, one of the key elements of their health care reform plan, cynically derided as expensive and unworkable was... you guessed it, expensive and unworkable. But then, as we all know, a bunch of the ACA's key assumptions - from the expansion of Medicaid without paying for it, to the cutting of Medicare without wanting to cut anything - are ludicrous, expensive, unrealistic, and unlikely to happen.

And I suppose one could, yet again, express exasperation with this Administration; point to the lousy process of creating a deeply flawed, unworkable health reform plan; complain bitterly about how Washington works; maybe handwrite a sign and take it to a local protest.... but for me, all I can do is shake my head. Two years of pointing out that this stuff won't work... and guess what, it doesn't work. Nothing but class... all the way.